


Transference

by Petra



Category: Ashes to Ashes, Life on Mars (UK)
Genre: Dream Sequence, F/M, M/M, Masturbation, Multi, Threesome (m/m/f)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-07
Updated: 2010-11-07
Packaged: 2017-10-13 05:27:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Petra/pseuds/Petra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam tries to convince himself he is in love with Alex to give himself something to hold on to. Set in the Blue Period of LoM 2x08; no references to Ashes to Ashes continuity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Transference

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hammerxsword](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Hammerxsword).



> With thanks to the usual suspects. Written in the Life on Mars 2010 Ficathon for [](http://hammerxsword.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**hammerxsword**](http://hammerxsword.dreamwidth.org/), for the prompt: "Sweet dreams are made of these"

Sam hates the hospital, the constant light, the constant noise, the constant company. He doesn't feel guilty about spending more than half his time there thinking about the place everyone tells him isn't real. Whatever it is, it's a sight better than thinking about white walls, white sheets, white faces giving him the feeblest of smiles. When he's home again--not a flat of his own, he's not ready for that, but staying with his mum so there's someone to look after him--at least he has a separate room, not a place on a ward where no one is ever alone, even in the depths of the night.

He's not alone then either, because no matter how many people tell him to let go of his delusions, they sound as mad to him as he sounded to Annie in 1973. The psychologist who comes to talk to him is a pretty, bright woman, up from London and doing research on police officers who have undergone stressful situations. Sam tries to believe in her for the length of the interviews, tries to make her as real as his memories.

It's a blessing that she's from the south. If he could close his eyes and listen to a soft northern voice asking him about his troubles, he'd be able to lose himself mid-session thinking of Annie.

Alex is nothing like Annie, her accent posh, her clothes flattering and professional with none of the patterns Sam found appalling, then endearing. When she asks, "How are you today?" he can tell her the truth almost every time.

"I can't stop thinking about it, about them," he admits. "I don't want to, even though I know--even though everyone says I should."

Alex frowns slightly. "How do you think you can convince yourself that you must?"

"I don't know. I need to find something here that I want to believe in. But it's all so far away."

Her sympathetic smile is convincing, though she raises her eyebrows. Someday soon she'll give up on him and go away, take what she's learned and leave him in peace. Sam's sure of that. He's not making any progress, and he knows the first rule of any sort of therapy is that he has to want to change. He can't have the whole of his job back until he's shown that he has a firmer grasp on reality; desk-bound, doing other people's paperwork, he feels less alive than he ever has. Gene would never stand for such a thing, but there is no Gene here to overturn the desk, to overturn Sam's life and drag him out into the streets where things happen.

"You need a touchstone," Alex says.

"I suppose, but I haven't found one."

Alex listens well and there's a kind of rapport between them, or at least a sympathy. Except, when they're not in the same room, she's less real to him than Annie is.

Sam tries to believe in Alex after the sessions, but her face gets away from him half the time until he finds a copy of her personnel file and surreptitiously photocopies her identification photo. It doesn't look like Alex, not the real one: her hair is out of date, her agile mouth set in a line, her eyes blank. Still, the lines of her face are the same. It helps, but not enough.

He doesn't love her, and he never expected to or wanted to. But he needs to love something he can't find inside his head. His mum is wonderful, and she always has been, but that's not enough. She's too much of a constant, always has been, even young and blonde and beautiful. Maya's gone. No woman in her right mind would look at Sam as he is now--pale as hospital sheets, weak as a kitten--and want anything from him but the time. And as for men, there are blokes who go for that kind of thing, but they're sicker than he is, bug-chasers or the like.

Without many options, Sam tries to convince himself he is in love with Alex for the sake of argument. He has every excuse to look at her while she's talking to him, trying to draw him into this imitation of a world, and he saves up the little things for later as much as he can. If he could take notes the way she is, he'd be writing as furiously. But while she's writing "Clings to delusions" and "Obsession with mentor/father figure," he'd be writing, "Quirk of her mouth when she's amused" and "Slight gasp before she laughs."

He does have one note on paper about her, and he puts it under his pillow every night in a kind of ceremony. It says, "Transference," and it doesn't need to say more. Whatever he works himself into thinking about Alex, she's not going to feel the same for him. If he starts to forget that, he takes out the paper and reads it again.

She's the most alive thing in his life, the only woman who gets close enough that he can smell her perfume, and he won't tell her how many nights he's tried to imagine her in his bed. It's been too long by every measure of time, real, illusory, or comatose, since he touched a woman. Maya barely meets his eyes now if they pass in the hall, he won't think of Joni Newton, and imagining Annie would be counterproductive.

Sam's not hurting Alex by imagining her naked beside him in his bed, her breasts full and warm in his hands, her heart beating as strongly as Annie's. He can guess at the sounds she'd make with a mouth on her nipple, the way she'd wriggle when she was excited. How she'd look if she spread her legs for him.

Alex is demanding, Sam is sure of that. She's relentless and she'd push him wherever she wanted him till he had his tongue inside her, teasing her for all he's worth. He can't guess what she tastes like, precisely, and he's promised himself he won't try to work it out empirically, but he's had enough women that he can make that part up without feeling as though he's lying to himself any more than about the rest. And he knows the way his name sounds in her voice, the precise quality of the vowel and the way she snaps it, sometimes, when he's drifting.

He'd be drifting given half a chance, burying himself in her, looking for something real to hold onto, her hips curving and arching under his hands. He's lost himself that way before, happy to go on for days, and he can't imagine that it would be different with Alex until she gave his hair a sharp tug and said his name.

On the good days, when he's good, he can keep it to just Alex until he has tossed off, thinking of her and remembering that she's alive, that she's out there somewhere breathing even if she's not whimpering with pleasure for him, even though she never will. She's real then.

On the bad days, when he's not good, it's not always Alex tugging at his hair, saying his name like it's meant to wake him. Sometimes it's Gene, or Annie, and he's no good at ignoring either of them. When he starts to hear them, he can't want to stop. Those are the days when he loses the battle.

Tonight, Sam can hear Gene as clearly as Alex, and that means he's doing this wrong, no matter how many times Alex has told him that sexual fantasies created by the subconscious are all morally equivalent. When it's Gene pulling his head up, away from her, Sam's still on his knees in the dream-space but it's a different place, a different bed, one with space for three.

If he works at it, he can hold the image of Alex there, too. He can see the way her eyes would go wide, the way she always smiles like she's sorry for him and amused by him all at once, the way she looks when he talks about Gene.

"Filthy little pervert," Gene says, and while Sam has had to put this Alex together piece by piece, he's never had to work to imagine Gene. "Look at you, on your knees for this tart."

Alex wouldn't take that well, though Sam's not sure what she'd say. She'd tell him, "Piss off," or something of that sort, but he wouldn't go, not Gene.

Not for some bird who calls herself a headshrinker, not when he's already on top of Sam, rutting against his arse. "What, you like your men to be boys, Miss Drake?"

"Ms.," she says, as she would, and Gene laughs.

Sam can't think what to say, or how to make peace between them. He's lonely--he's alone, really, and that seeps in around the edges of the fantasy, for all he can focus on imaginary Alex and nonexistent, never-was Gene. "Stop arguing," he says, though he knows Gene, and he's learning Alex. It's an empty request, and not one he has the power to enforce anywhere outside of the inside of his head. Or in it, just now. "Don't have a row, not like this. Just fuck me."

"Thought you'd never ask, Sammy-boy." And he never did, and that is a regret he's not going to let go of any time soon. Gene swats his arse, as he would if he thought he could get away with it, a stinging, possessive spank that makes Sam shiver.

Alex sighs, a long-suffering, shuddering sound that he's heard her make in real life, mostly in relation to Sam's fixation on Annie. Or Gene. Or both of them. "This isn't helping you," she says, and draws one leg up, lithe and comfortable in her own skin for all she's flashing them both a delightful view.

"It's not hurting," Sam protests. "Don't go."

"It doesn't count as queer if there's a girl there, does it, Gladys?" Gene asks, with all the weight of irony that hadn't been invented in the Seventies proper.

It's a fantasy, so there's no need for long preparation or realistic discomfort, only a few twists of Gene's fingers inside him, slick and demanding, until Sam's groaning aloud at the thought.

"Of course it doesn't count when there's a lady present, Guv."

Alex laughs, sounding more incredulous than amused. "Sam--"

"Good boy," Gene says, and pushes into him, pulling Sam back onto his cock, as implacable and demanding as gravity. "You're not going to start telling me this makes me a fairy."

"Never," Sam says, and braces his hand on Alex's thigh. He smiles at her in the momentary lull between one stroke and another, then feels himself grimacing in the dream and in his bed, losing track of her. "Let me--" he says.

Because she's not there, she gives in, though she's laughing as she does it. "You're a danger to yourself and others, Sam."

He argues with her without saying anything, only trying to prove that he's not dangerous. He's a perfectly nice, perfectly fucked man who wants nothing more than to bury his face in a dream of her and lick her open again, nuzzle at her clit and suck at her until she clutches at his head with the same force that Gene's holding his hips.

But he’s not that innocent, and the niggling doubt is there even as he squeezes himself, trying to make the fantasy last as long as he can. He's dangerous to himself, and the insistent voices in his dreams are no less deadly for all Alex tells him, night and day, that they're not real.

Gene is as real as she is right then, more so, burying his face in the back of Sam's neck, his "Fuck, you're made for this. Made for me--" a counterpoint to Alex's distant gasps, the grasp of his fingers, the push of his cock harsh and entirely Gene.

Sam has never been good at ignoring his conscience, even a few breaths from orgasm, but he shouts at it now to be quiet, promises himself he'll deal with it all later, when he's not listening to a dream of Alex screaming, when she's not tugging his ears, when Gene isn't biting his shoulder and holding onto him so tightly that if his hands were real, Sam would have bruises come morning.

For a few moments, it's enough to belong to both of them at once, and Sam comes, torn between them, biting his lip so he doesn't wake his mum or say anyone's name at all.

When he's done cleaning himself up, he takes out the note again. Transference.

That wasn't Alex, and it wasn't Gene. Alex would never do that.

Though Gene might, given the opportunity. Sam smiles in the dark and puts the note under his pillow again.


End file.
